


Purrfectly Brewed

by JacarandaBanyan



Series: Tony Stark Bingo [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Coffee Addict Tony Stark, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Shifter AU, Stark Industies' PR Department Loves This New Intern, Tony Stark Bingo 2018, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, cat!Tony, tony being cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 04:47:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14825520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Tony loves the lattes Rhodey brings for him; there's coffee for human Tony and milk for cat Tony. He loves his lattes so much that he forgets to keep tabs on his mischievous intern.





	Purrfectly Brewed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flight_Of_Icarus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flight_Of_Icarus/gifts).



> For my R1 square, "coffee shop."
> 
> Ica, I have a note to myself at the top of the doc this was written in saying 'dedicate this to Ica, see Discord chat,' which is an utterly worthless note because I have on idea what specific conversation from Discord inspired this, but if I remember correctly you like Shifter AUs so I'm gifting it to you anyway.

“Mr. Stark?  _ Mr. Stark? _ ” 

Tony looked up from from his cushion on the workshop floor, where Dum-E was slowly, carefully stroking his back with his claw arm. Oh good, Peter was here. He was afraid the kid might get waylaid before he managed to find the workshop. Happy had gone a little overboard since Afghanistan, and it had only gotten worse with each successive Avengers incident. 

Peter kept looking wildly around the room, which, rude. Tony was clearly the center of attention right now. He really needed to get the kid up to speed on robot body language. 

“He must not be here.” Peter muttered. His shoulders drooped pathetically and no, the only one allowed to be that pathetic in the workshop was Tony himself.

He scrambled off the cushion and padded over to rub against Peter’s shins. He purred as loudly as he could, hoping the kid got the message. Peter started petting him, but persisted with the pathetic posture. Huh. Maybe he didn’t recognize Tony? That was a possibility. Had he ever shifted in front of the kid?

“Hello there,” the kid cooed. “When did you get down here? I didn’t know Mr. Stark had a cat. Oh, I read somewhere about a cat that co-authored a physics paper, are you like that cat? Mr. Stark seems like the sort of person who’d teach physics to a cat.” 

So no, the kid didn’t recognize him. 

Oh well. He was here, that was what mattered.

He was going to turn back to his human form and get this internship-show on the road, but then the kid started scratching his stomach and  _ oh, _ that felt nice. He wriggled over onto his back to offer better access and  _ meowed _ encouragingly. The kid’s eyes got bigger in that adorable, surprised-but-delighted way they did sometimes. It was a totally different (and much more welcome) look than the surprised-and-terrified look, though that one also involved wide eyes. The fingers in his belly fur got a little more purposeful and applied a little more pressure. Perfect. Pepper was wrong, he totally needed a petting intern as well as a science intern. Maybe he could just update Peter’s job title?

“You don’t have a collar, huh? I’ll have to ask Mr. Stark what your name is.”

Tony rolled his eyes, not that Peter could see since they were already slitted from the belly scratches. Of course he didn’t have a collar. While he would love to wear one with something funny printed on it, he wasn’t really on board with having a convenient handhold around his neck for other people to grab. Rhodey was bad enough with the manhandling when he thought Tony was doing something he shouldn’t, and didn’t seem to care when Tony scratched him in retribution. Besides, up until the arc reactor forced him to figure it out he hadn’t known how to make things shrink with him when he shifted, and a cat collar was way to small for a human. And they could be a safety hazard. He’d had people grab him by decorative collars in the past, and it was no more fun as a person than as a cat. 

Ah well. The pets were fun, but his intern had finally arrived and there was science to be done.

He flipped himself back over onto his feet and trotted over to the pile of clothes and blankets on his couch. Once under the blanket, he shifted back to human form and quickly pulled his pants back on. 

Perhaps he could figure out how to miniaturize his clothes with the shift the way he had the arc reactor? Eh, he didn’t really like wearing clothes as a cat, but it could be useful. He’d look into it. 

Once he’d managed to locate and put on his shirt, he stood up and turned to face his new intern. 

Who was doing an excellent impression of a fish out of water.

“You’re- _ that was you?” _

“Yep. You give excellent belly scratches by the way. Now, are you ready for some science?”

“But aren’t people’s shifted forms usually, like person-sized?” The kid asked in a breathy, disbelieving voice. 

Tony shrugged. “I mean, yeah, normally, but there are outliers. Surprise, surprise, I’m one of them. Now, are you ready for science or not?”

The kid didn’t look like he really wanted to let it go just yet, but he shut his mouth and awkwardly transitioned into asking questions about his lab equipment. Little did Tony know that this was not the end of it, but just the beginning. 

* * *

Tony liked his shifted form. People petted him and gave him belly scratches when he was shifted. He liked the way it made his mind stick a little bit more in the present, rather than spiraling ever further into more and more possible futures. Howard had been a dick about it, sure, but he’d been a dick about a lot of things. Tony was mostly over that now.

It took him a long time to figure out how to get the arc reactor to scale down with him when he shifted, which had resulted in quite a few painful shifts since Afghanistan, but he'd figured it out eventually. While he was at it, he’d also miniaturized the Iron Man suit and redone it to match his feline body. No one but him and his bots had seen that one; Pepper was on the fence already about him taking on supervillains in his human form, she’d probably throw a fit and raise a bunch of pesky yet relevant points about how small and delicate his shifted form was. And then she’d turn into her lioness form and sit on him to keep him from engineering a way around her arguments. So no one needed to know about that pet project just yet. 

But Jarvis wasn’t physically present, and the bots could sometimes be unreliable when it came to delicate tasks, so he couldn’t really test it just yet. If it didn’t work, he be stuck in kitty-shaped armor with no way out. Normally he’d ask Rhodey or Bucky, his boyfriend of about four months, but just this once both of them would most likely be on Pepper’s side. 

Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, so he invented an internship position and signed Peter Parker on. Pepper didn’t need to know every last thing the two of them worked on in the lab, after all.

* * *

Tony was already shifted when Rhodey gets off duty, but that was alright. Rhodey would pet him and scratch around his ears, and Tony could make a game out of seeing how loudly he could purr.

More importantly, Rhodey would bring him a latte that Tony adores from that heavenly coffee shop near one of those military bases. The one that Rhodey will never tell him the location of because he’s a  _ giant meanie _ who won’t even let his _ oldest friend _ in on the Secret of the Perfect Lattes. But in the moment he could forgive him, since he  _ had  _ brought some home for him. The heavenly combination of coffee for human Tony and warm milk for cat Tony was delightful just to think about. It would probably be a health hazard for a normal cat, but that was the beauty of being able to shift back into human form at the drop of a hat. 

Sure enough, when Rhodey entered the penthouse he was carrying a cup of coffee with a familiar logo on the side. He held it in both hands, probably remembering times past when Tony had been too impatient and had literally knocked the cup out of his hand and lapped the sweet coffee off the floor. Peter followed behind him carrying Tony’s “water” dish. He made sure to meow his appreciation and rub up against both of their knees. 

Rhodey took forever to get his shoes off the end of his new prosthetics. Tony mentally set made a note to self to take that into account when he inevitably redesigned them. Issue noted, he set about prancing around and meowing as pitifully as he could. Unfortunately, Rhodey had gotten good at ignoring his “carrying on,” as he called it. After that avenue failed, he turned to his intern. Peter hadn’t had time to build up an immunity to his big, wide, pleading eyes yet.

Peter had his phone out and was looking at something on the screen. Not a problem, Tony knew for a fact he was cute enough as a cat to distract from anything on that screen save perhaps another cat. 

“Leave the poor kid alone, Tony, you’ll get your latte in a minute.”

He flicked his tail in irritation, but Rhodey was right. The special Rhodey Just Got Off Duty Latte was a time-honored tradition between the two of them, and no matter how cute his new science mentee was, he was a couple of decades too late to get in on this. 

Instead, he yowled as loud and long as possible and ran in circles around his friend. He’d get in his line of sight, dramatically collapse to the floor and howl. Rhodey would ignore him and look away, and Tony would hop up and start again. Every now and then he’d break and give Tony a scratch behind the ear or a long, spine-undulating pet, but beg as he might not a single drop of glorious latte had graced his tongue. 

“Come on Tones, I just need to get out of my uniform and then I’ll give it to you.”

Tony meowed pitifully and did his best impression of a stray starving on the street.

“You could just turn back and serve it to yourself, you know. You could have opposable thumbs right now if you wanted.”

Well, he  _ could _ if his clothes weren’t down in the lab. If it had just been Rhodey he might have shifted back naked just to prove a point, but the kid was still here, and hanging out naked with his intern sounded like something on the  _ do not do _ list in the Stark Industries workplace harassment pamphlets. The last thing he wanted to do was screw up his first one-on-one internship with a kid as good as Peter.

He batted at Rhodey’s shoelaces just to be contrary.

At last, Rhodey put his shoes on the shelf and poured Tony his latte. No sooner was his dish on the ground than he was buried face-first in the liquid, drinking as fast as his little tongue could move. 

* * *

Bucky Barnes had slowly but surely integrated into the Compound since the team had tracked him down in Romania. The first couple of months had been kind of shaky, especially as some of his memories of his time as the Winter Soldier started to come back to him. He’d hid outside in the woods for a solid week after telling Tony in short, clipped sentences that he’d been the one to kill Tony’s parents. For a while there he’d been completely and totally unwilling to stay human in Natasha’s presence, but unwilling to shift into his white wolf form where Steve could see.

He’d slowly but surely gotten better though. Just last month Tony had made a special trip out to the compound with Dum-E so that he could throw the tennis ball after tennis ball for Bucky, Steve, and Thor’s canine forms all day. It had taken him hours to decontaminate his bot and clean all of the slobber out of his joints, but the happy beeping more than made up for it. 

It wasn’t long after that that they’d gotten together.

Tony really liked Bucky. Bucky gave him delightful back scratches and ear scratches and tummy scratches. Until he’d met Bucky, the title of best scratcher probably would have gone to Dum-E, who was ridiculously deliberate about scratching all of his favorite spots. Bucky, however, could give him dual-action scratches with his metal hand and flesh hand working in tandem. The metal hand scratched, with more dexterity than Dum-E, bless his bolts, just couldn’t quite achieve, while the flesh hand petted and smoothed the fur his metal hand messed up. 

Which was why Dum-E was currently pouting and purposefully misinterpreting Tony’s orders. 

“Dum-E, I asked for the fire extinguisher, not a bucket of water. The fire extinguisher that you love? The one I couldn’t get you to put down just two weeks ago, when I really needed to be clean for lunch with Pepper and nothing was in danger of catching fire? I promise, the fire extinguisher will work much better if this catches on fire. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a million times, water doesn’t work on electrical fires, because  _ water conducts electricity _ .” 

Dum-E whirred mal contentedly and rolled back towards the other end of the workshop. 

“Is this because of Bucky?” Tony yelled after him. “Liking his fingers doesn’t mean I like your any less, it just means he’s a god among men with glorious metal fingers.”

Bucky did that aborted laugh-snort thing he sometimes did when he was laughing at the bots but didn’t want to offend them. Tony would have play-slapped him if he weren’t acting as a clamp on a rather important part of Tony’s recent research right then.

“Hey Dum-E,” he called from behind Tony, “how about we settle this thing once and for all?”

Dum-E swivelled around curiously.

“Tony can shift, and we can have a little competition. I’ll take half of his body and you’ll take the other half, and we’ll each scratch him. First to get him into their lap wins. I won’t use my normal arm, so I won’t have a flesh advantage.”

Which was how Tony found himself on the lab floor getting scratched by two sets of metal fingers when Peter walked into the lab with his eyes buried in the assignment Tony had given him earlier. He held a thermos in the other. 

“Mr. Stark, sir, I have a question about…”

He stopped dead, clearly taking in the super-reinforced cable tying Bucky’s flesh arm behind his back, Dum-E’s blatant attempts at cheating by pulling Tony closer to himself, and the pile of unfinished work on the table. 

Tony closed his eyes and concentrating on enjoying this just a little bit longer. Whatever Peter’s question was, it was more important than his attempts to melt into the lab floor in a puddle of happy kitty-goo.

Reluctantly, he started to get up so he could find his clothes and shift back. 

“No, Mr. Stark, it’s okay, sir, it can wait, you don’t have to do that!” Peter threw his hands up, palms forward and relaxed in a placating gesture. He almost dropped the thermos, but managed to catch it awkwardly with his thumb and pinky at the last second. “You keep doing… whatever you’re doing. No rush”

He practically fell into a seat next to Butterfingers and U’s charging stations. The assignment paper in his hand no longer had even a fraction of his focus, and he didn’t pay enough attention when he sat the thermos down, so it ended up tipping over and falling on its side. He slid his phone out of his pants and fiddled with it in his hand. 

Tony squinted at his intern suspiciously, but then Bucky rubbed those delicious fingers over that spot behind his ears that always made him arch involuntarily and he got distracted. 

Bucky, however, took that as his queue to start talking to the kid, which was okay so long as he didn’t stop scratching. 

“Taking another video Peter?”

“Yeah. Ms Potts said I should take pictures and photos of stuff during the internship and send them to the PR department. So long as there’s nothing bad in them, they put them up on the official page. I usually send them to Mr. Stark too, but Jarvis says he doesn’t check his email, so Jarvis just approves them on his behalf.”

“Oh yeah?” Bucky asked. His voice was low and soothing, like melting chocolate. Tony liked it well enough in his human form, but with his cat form’s sensitive ears it was even better. 

“Yeah. PR likes them a lot. They’re getting a lot of views.”

“Uh huh. And is that thermos what I suspect it is?”

“Right!” Peter leaped up again. “Col. Rhodes said to bring you this.”

Tony’s ears pricked up. The thermos was from Rhodey? That could only mean latte!

He leaped to his feat and charged at Peter, yowling at the top of his little lungs. Scratches were great, but lattes from that place Rhodey knew were very serious business. 

“We’ve been abandoned, Dum-E,” he heard Bucky laugh. “Here kid, fend him off for a few minutes, I’ll find a bowl or something.”

* * *

Tony drifts into consciousness slowly. The first sense to come to him is touch, and the warm body curled around him bleeds over comfortingly into his dreams of perfect lattes and his boyfriend petting him softly as he sat curled up in his lap. Next is his hearing, and Tony wonders if his boyfriend had been breathing quite that noticeably before, but dismisses it. The sound is soothing, and this is a good dream, so of course he was always breathing like that.

Taste and smell start to pull him awake properly. They confuse him; where did the scent of coffee go? Why has the flavor of perfectly blended coffee and milk on his tongue been replaced with that dry, stale taste he gets before his morning coffee? 

Sight comes at last as he blinks his eyes open. He rubs the last crusty traces of sleep from the corners of his eyes, and snuggles closer into Bucky’s side. His regular breathing breaks, and he laughs quietly under Tony’s hands.

“Finally awake?”

“Only if there’s coffee.”

“Well then you’re in luck. Your friend left me something for you before he left last night. I’ll heat it up on the stove, but you’ve gotta get out of bed if you want it.”

Tony’s pre-coffee brain tried to parse that. Then it tried again. It felt like he knew what those words meant strung together like that, but he had to check.

“Special latte?”

“Special latte.” 

“I’ll get up if you get up.”

“You just want to ride me to the kitchen, don’t you?”

“You know me so well.”

Bucky rolled over to the edge of the bed and slid over the side. Halfway over he started shifting, and by the time he hit the floor he had three furry paws and one metal one under him. He huddled up next to the bed in white wolf form and looked expectantly at Tony. 

Tony shifted and crawled out from under the covers. The bed was very soft and sank easily under his paws, which made it a little more difficult to reach the edge than it would have been if he hadn’t shifted. 

But if he hadn’t shifted, he couldn’t have ridden Bucky into the kitchen.

He wiggled his rear, positioned himself, and pounced on Bucky’s back. His claws caught in his boyfriend’s thick, soft fur and he wiggled around until he was well balanced enough not to fall off halfway there.

Once he stopped moving, Bucky began plodding towards the kitchen slowly and carefully so he wouldn’t accidentally topple his passenger. He lowered his head to pick a bathrobe up off the floor before they left their room so he’d have something warm to change into when he shifted back to reheat Tony’s latte.

Peter was sitting in the kitchen when they got there, scrolling through something on his phone. Tony belatedly remembered that they’d worked so late last night on the Iron Kitty suit that he’d told the kid to just sleep over. Ah well. Bucky had a robe dangling from his mouth, and if Tony really needed to shift back he could run back to the bedroom. 

He stopped paying attention to Peter after that. Reheated Rhodey Latte was on its way. 

* * *

It took Tony an embarrassingly long time to discover that Peter wasn’t just sending cute sciencey videos or pictures of Dum-E wearing a party hat to PR to publish on official SI sites and accounts. He was also filming Tony in his shifted form and spinning them as ‘funny cat videos meets Stark Industries product promotion’ videos.

**_Stark Industries Leg Prosthetics withstand the Impatient Kitty Test,_ ** on video was titled.  **_Kitty gets Precision Scratches from Stark Industries Prosthetic and Robotic Hands,_ ** claimed another. The most recent one read  **_New Stark Industries Shift-Friendly Limb Prosthetic Supports Weight + A Kitty_ ** . Each video had millions of hits. The Stark Industries Twitter and Facebook pages were swamped with ‘Technology Kitty Wants Coffee’ memes. 

Bucky wrapped an arm around Tony’s shoulders and nuzzled his ear the same way he would have if he’d shifted. 

“Well, now that the whole world can see how cute you are as a cat, of course they’re popular. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to watch videos about you being silly?”

Ah well. At least Peter hadn’t uploaded any Iron Kitty videos. 


End file.
